Creative Class

The new website for our Institute, the Martin Propserity Institute is live today. Thanks to Ian Swain MPI researcher, DJ and internet impressario, to the MPI team and the Mark G and the crew at Naked Creative for all their terrific effort.  We’ll be updating and adding content over time, but the site is up and running. Send us any comments or suggestions

Former President Bill Clinton warned Saturday that the country is becoming
increasingly polarized despite the historic nature of the Democratic primary. Speaking at the National Governors Association’s semiannual meeting, Clinton
noted that on the one hand, following the early stages of the Democratic
primary, “the surviving candidates were an African-American man and a woman.” …  But this achievement was overshadowed by a growing distance between
Americans, said Clinton.  “Underneath this apparent accommodation to our diversity, we are in fact
hunkering down in communities of like-mindedness, and it affects our ability to
manage difference,” Clinton said.

Clinton developed his 44-minute speech from themes he said he drew from a new
book, “The Big Sort,” by Bill Bishop. He cited statistics compiled by Bishop that found that in the 1976
presidential election, only 20 percent of the nation’s counties voted for Jimmy
Carter or President Ford by more than a 20 percent margin. By contrast, 48 percent of the nation’s counties in 2004 voted for John Kerry
or President Bush by more than 20 points, Clinton said.
“We were sorting ourselves out by choosing to live with people that we agree
with,” Clinton said.

The rest is here (h/t: Patrick Adler). Way to go Bill  – Bishop that is.

The great fire-sale of US assets continues. In the 1980s, it was Japanese and European companies buying up US factories, who incidentally helped restore their competitiveness. Then, there was the buy-up of great buildings and commercial real estate. Now, the the dollar down and weakened real estate markets comes the buying up of prestige properties in super-star markets from NY to Palm Beach.   The Wall Street Journal reports on the recent buying binge by the Russian super-rich:

As many of America’s wealthy are roiled by the credit
crisis and general financial gloom, a growing number of rich Russians
are house-shopping — and buying — in costly U.S. enclaves.

Fertilizer mogul Dmitry Rybolovlev is set to pay
nearly $100 million to Donald Trump for an oceanfront mansion in Palm
Beach, Fla., say people familiar with the deal reached in May. Last
year, Oleg Baibakov, president of GSC City, a Moscow
construction-management and consulting firm, bought a condo at
Manhattan’s Time Warner Center for $13.5 million, according to public
records.

And in Snowmass, Colo., perhaps the most famous
Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, paid $36.4 million in April for a
200-acre ranch. The property’s massive, split-level house is five
minutes away from an $11.8 million ski-in, ski-out house that Mr.
Abramovich, owner of England’s Chelsea soccer team, purchased two
months earlier, records show …

In New York City, foreign buyers now make up about 15%
of the market, with Russians the largest contingent, says Hall Willkie,
president of real-estate firm Brown Harris Stevens. “A few years ago we
didn’t see any Russians,” Mr. Willkie says. “But now, especially at the
high end of the market they are buying big apartments…so they are a
significant factor.” …

Sergey Skaterschikov, a Moscow-based private-equity
investor, is shopping for a house in Palo Alto, Calif., because his son
will attend school in the area … At a recent Sotheby’s International Realty conference,
agents discussed Russian as well as Chinese nationals as new markets
for eight-figure homes, according to Washington, D.C.-based broker
Daryl Judy … In January, San Francisco-based brokers Misha
Kurgatnikov and Victor Borelli met with a delegation of more than 100
Russia-based brokers representing wealthy Moscow clients interested in
buying distressed luxury properties in California and Las Vegas …

Russian developers also are getting involved. Mirax
Group Corp. of Moscow has invested in 13 partially completed houses at
the Aqua, a New Urbanist-style development near Miami’s South Beach.
The $75 million project will offer fully equipped homes, including
linens, flatware and towels, aimed at Moscow-based buyers … It
hopes eventually to be involved in developments in cities including New
York, Atlanta, Chicago, Las Vegas and Aspen, Colo., says Dimitry
Lutsenko, a Mirax board member, via email. Security-related requests by Russian buyers are
common, including underground parking, gated entrances and video
cameras.

Vivek Wadhwa reports on his research which shows how much foreign-born talent mean to the US economy and why US immigration policy is causing many to leave. Money quote: ‘We need to do all we can to attract and keep skilled immigrants rather than
bring them here temporarily, train them, and send them home.”

In over 25 percent of tech companies founded in the United States
from 1995 to 2005, the chief executive or lead technologist was foreign-born. In
2005, these companies generated $52 billion in revenue and employed 450,000
workers. In some industries, such as semiconductors, the numbers were much
higher—immigrants founded 35 percent of start-ups. In Silicon Valley, the
percentage of immigrant-founded start-ups had increased to 52 percent.

When we looked into the backgrounds of these immigrant founders, we found
that they tended to be highly educated—96 percent held bachelor’s degrees and 74
percent held a graduate or postgraduate degree. And 75 percent of these degrees
were in fields related to science, technology, engineering, and
mathematics.

The vast majority of these company founders didn’t come to the United States
as entrepreneurs—52 percent came to study, 40 percent came to work, and 6
percent came for family reasons. Only 1.6 percent came to start companies in
America. They found that the United States provided a fertile environment for
entrepreneurship. Even though these founders didn’t come to the United States with the intent,
they typically started their companies around 13 years after arriving in the
country.

Most students and skilled temporary workers who come to the United States
want to stay, as is evident from the backlog for permanent resident visas. Yet
we’re leaving these potential immigrants little choice but to return home. “The
New Immigrant Survey,” by Guillermina Jasso of New York University and other
leading academics, found that approximately one in five new legal immigrants and
about one in three employment principals either plan to leave the United States
or are uncertain about remaining. These surveys were done in 2003, before the
backlog increased so dramatically.

More here.

My new Globe and Mail column is out:

The days of urban sprawl are over …

… but not for the reasons you think

(more…)

Writing in the New Statesman, Andrew Stephen compares the US crumbling infrastructure to conditions he observed during the collapse of the Soviet Union (via Planetizen).

The fact that I sat in my top-floor office in a puddle of sweat for
most of the second week of this month because the air-conditioning had
failed, for example, is hardly something I would expect the candidates
to lose too much sleep over – even when the temperature inside crept
past 110 degrees. For me, it all culminated in a visit from Bill, my
friendly air-conditioning technician, on the morning of Friday the 13th.

What he told me symbolised much more than the strangely confused and
angry mood that consumes America when the mere subject of “energy
conservation” comes up. The ramifications went far beyond my usually
nicely cooled, breezy office. Even America’s outrageous hogging of the
world’s energy supplies – it comprises just 5 per cent of the world’s
population but uses 23 per cent of its energy resources – no longer
seemed that surprising, let alone outrageous. It was what was going on
around me and Bill as we spoke early that morning that brought home
something I have been noticing with increasing alarm over the past two
decades: the sheer fragility of America’s crumbling infrastructures.

To my American readers: please do not get too angry with me when I
say this, but the rapidity of the deterioration of your country’s infra
structures often reminds me of an extensive tour of the Soviet Union I
undertook in 1986 – when I saw for myself, in places such as industrial
Ukraine and Siberia and St Petersburg, that the Soviet Union had
already had its day. For just as Bill and I were having our grim
conversation early that Friday morning – and unknown to either of us at
the time – the heart of the capital of the most powerful nation on
earth, less than a mile from where we stood, had been plunged into the
kind of chaos one might envisage in, say, New Delhi on a very, very bad
day.

Having only been to Russia recently, I can’t speak directly to his comparison. But, having lived in Washington DC I suffered through many, many power
outages. Rana and I often remarked  that it felt like we
were living not in an advanced country but the third world. We’ve yet
to experience a single outage in Toronto, while her family’s power was
out for days upon days in suburban Detroit.

(Image from the Boston Globe )

Density makes places more Democratic. That’s the conclusion from this map and the accompanying Boston Globe article (via Planetizen) by Robert David Sullivan:

The accompanying map shows where the electorate has grown the most
over the past half-century – counties that in 2004 cast at least 10,000
votes and at least double the votes cast in the 1960 race between John
F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. In just about every major metropolitan
area, Democrats are strongest in the center and Republicans fare best
farther out, but the patterns depend on how long ago the suburbs began
to grow.

In the oldest metropolitan areas, there are outlying
counties that were solidly Republican in the 1960s and 1970s, but have
trended Democratic as development has cooled down. (They include
Barnstable County in Massachusetts. Southern New Hampshire, past its
peak rate of growth, is heading in the same direction.) This phenomenon
has had a significant impact on presidential elections. When California
was one of the fastest-growing states, it was reliably Republican, but
it became safely Democratic in the 1990s, when its population growth
rate fell sharply …

Sprawl has kept
Republicans competitive at the national level, but the “frontier vote”
may be reaching its limit. The rising price of gasoline and a soft
housing market (made worse by the foreclosure crisis) have had more
people questioning the value of long commutes and mansion-sized houses.

Bill Fulton takes on Joel Kotkin’s criticisms of Chris Leinberger’s intriguing arguments about sprawl, declining suburbs and walkable urbanism:

Joel Kotkin is at it again. In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times Sunday opinion section, the enfant terrible
of L.A. urbanism dissed the “suburbs as slums” thesis of Brookings’
Christopher Leinberger. But in once again coming to the defense of
“suburbs”, he has revealed that he can’t tell the difference between
Glendale and Palmdale …

In a similar fashion to last summer’s debacle – when he decried Pasadena-sized densities as “Manhattanization” – Kotkin has now confused Glendale with Palmdale. He
argued that Leinberger is wrong because people and jobs are not flowing
to Downtown Los Angeles in huge numbers. He claimed that Leinberger and
his sympathizers base their research mostly on anecdotes, rather than
facts. And he concluded that “rather than cramming more people and
families into cities,” high energy prices and similar trends “may
instead foster a more dispersed, diversified archipelago of
self-sufficient communities.” As examples he lists Burbank,
Ontario, and West L.A. – all job-rich “suburbs” where commutes are
shorter than they are in inner-city L.A …

The
inescapable conclusion is that Kotkin is about 30 years out of date. His mind lives in a ring of older suburbs that circle downtown L.A. –
Burbank, the San Gabriel Valley, the Westside, Irvine, all built
between the 1920s and the 1960s as residential suburbs. Kotkin always
casts the “urban v. suburban” battle as a battle between Downtown Los
Angeles and these “suburbs”.

The rest is here (via Planetizen).

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrock asks:

What is the probability of a family
having two girls if one of the children is a girl named Florida?

Alex notes it’s a rare first name. Florida Florida – has a certain “ring” to it:-)

Ok, now I’m really excited.  One of our central goals here at MPI is to create integrated North American (that is Canada and the US) data-sets. And in our ongoing work, especially in developing the new Canadian edition of Who’s Your City? we’ve been developing maps of North American data on various regional economic and demographic measures. So was I more than delighted to see the map above developed by David Eaves based on an original map I posted from calorielab (via strange maps and Andrew Sullivan). Eaves comments:

If Canadian provinces were ranked along side US States, they would
rank 1st (BC), 2nd (QC), 3rd (ON), 4th (AL) and tied for 5th (MB) (YK)
as the least obese provinces/states. Colorado would be the first
American state placing 7th, with the provinces of NS in 8th and SK in
9th. PEI and NB would appear 15th and 16th and NL would appear 19th.
NWT and NU would close out in 30th and 31st position. You can see the
original chart at the bottom of this page.
Actually even some of the grimmer looking patches of Canada’s map
have a silver lining. The Arctic Territories, specifically Nunavut (NU)
and the North-West Territories (NWT), appear obese and thus unhealthy.
However, Statistics Canada notes that obesity criterion for Inuit
populations should be more relaxed since a high BMI does not appear to
have the same health risk for Inuit as for non-Inuit.